Zdenek Kosek

Born 1949 in Duchcov – CZECH REPUBLIC.

Zdenek Kosek worked as a typographer and drew caricatures and satirical cartoons for regional magazines and newspapers. A self-taught artist, he has also produced a number of more or less conventional paintings. In the 1980s a deep psychological divide gradually changed his perception of the world ; he was diagnosed as psychotic and had to retire in 1989. From then on he will produce a work radically different from his previous paintings.
The theme of most of his works on paper is meteorology and weather. Kosek has been convinced that he plays a determining role at heart of the great ruling of the world. He sees himself as a kind of power station, continuously receiving and emitting multitudes of information. He thinks that his duty is to master the meteorological problems. He spends his days in front of the window, convinced that he can provoke or control the forming of the weather, writing down everything happening around him : the direction of the winds, the movement of the clouds, the flight of the birds, sounds, the changes of temperature, different combinations (infinite) among numbers, letters and chemical elements, his ideas, the thoughts of the others, etc. He draws in notebooks, on maps in an atlas or on old magazines or newspapers. His diagrams serve him as a direct means to influence weather – an indispensable ritual dictated to him, to which he abandons himself in order to avoid what he fears would be irreversible chaos. By sticking his schemes onto the window of his appartment, he communicates with birds, which to him are beings superior to man.
After two years of incessant activity, ill and exhausted, he was hospitalized. Today he seems to have found a fragile equilibrium.